


Rorschach

by Eternal



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rebuild of Evangelion | Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition, Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 20:04:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9341114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eternal/pseuds/Eternal
Summary: 'I bought this phone to replace the casette player you lost.' And Viktor smiles half mournfully, almost as if he were sorry.





	1. Chapter 1

They slide forwards on invisible tracks connecting one location to another, engaging and disengaging fluid mechanisms. The cubicle is fingernail sized compared to the enormous polished megastructure below them, a crystal structure of polished angles and facets suspended by an unknown force.

It’s raining so the overcast sky frowns granular and harsh above. Down below a boy sits on the floor hugging his knees and the skin around his eyes tightens as he examines his reflection against the flat plane of the floor. One shoelace hangs loose and the top button of his collar is undone but it hasn’t been folded properly.

‘Viktor,’ the boy says. Dark circles are underneath his eyes. ‘Viktor, please help me.’

The back of Viktor’s leg is pressed against the hard transparent wall of the cube. ‘There’s nothing I can do to help you.’ He says quietly. ‘You’re a survivor. It only gets worse here on in not better.’

Yuuri’s torso shudders. Beneath them, the berry red sea spreads underneath them, washing up on shores of carved teeth. Failures of Infinity stood at irregular intervals, one more soul for Angels to call their own, encroaching on the landmass, each once a human and now a monument to time.

‘There was nothing you could do.’

‘Could I?’ Yuuri whispers.

‘You did your best. You fought bravely and that’s the most that anyone can do.’

One of Viktor’s hand envelopes his chin, lost in thought. His dog, Makkachin, licks at his other hand with a slapping regularity.

‘And when I didn’t? When I was a coward?’

‘You’ll do better next time, for me, won’t you?’ Viktor says, grinning. He’s produced an index finger, like the defence of humanity is a joke. Effortlessly, he bends to tie Yuuri’s shoelace with the quick graceful movements of a pre-Third Impact dancer. Post-Third Impact, those hands were elegant weapons, not at all like Yuuri’s clumsy grip on the Eva controls as the corruption rose up and up and up his arm. He still feels nauseated when he thinks about it.

Viktor is done and just as quickly, he fluidly rises from where he was kneeling. ‘Sevastopol,’ he says, ‘the last bastion of human civilisation on Earth which survived the Third Impact. Foundation. Time to go, Yu-uri.’

A hand is offered. They fly, falling through the air through invisible tubes as they are scooped through the air by elevators. Makkachin’s tongue lolls as if such a mundane situation could not faze him and it is Yuuri’s eyes which are like that of a trapped animal scenting new unfamiliar ground. He tries to thrust out his jaw defiant, to blank out his eyes like Yurio would have.

When they step out with a blast of air, the older man’s brown coat whips into the air, secured around Yuuri’s shoulders by hands firmly anchoring them in place. Tiny people, shrivelled by the distance walk about in white coats operating shining machinery and floors below lie the red sea lapping where humans dare not touch.

* * *

 

Viktor loves to smile. It brings a softness to the harsh lines of his face. In the lines of his form, Yuuri can see Yurio’s mentor. Yurio in the toss of the head, but less steep, softer and somehow more precise. Controlled. The man that Yurio would have been if Yuuri hadn’t nipped him in the bud.

Viktor scoops the last of the curry into his mouth, wielding the chopsticks like a sword to Yuuri’s guinea pig. His face is a merry pink despite how cold it is in the room.

Yuuri’s own bowl, on the other hand, sits just as it had been where the tray had been sent out of the hole in the wall. The disposable chopsticks, now twice washed sat on the right hand side of his grey tray, the bowl in the middle on the colourless mat supposed to keep the rations lukewarm.  

There is a hole in the ceiling where the fan was but the hole hadn’t been patched over. Dark grey metal is visible beyond, the only interruption in the white of the room, not a trace of colour between them except the food and the two of them. Even the canteen bench that they sit on is white and purely utilitarian, there is no gap between it and the floor as if the room had been built with only the pilots in mind, but many more pilots than the room currently held.

‘Are you going to eat this?’ The Russian says, pointing his chopsticks at Yuuri’s untouched bowl.

Yuuri shakes his head and when there is no real response forthcoming a spoon full of curry assails his nose. As always, Viktor was trying to probe out a frictionless path to Yuuri’s motivation, as if no chasm existed between them, as if the boy was still a confident pilot with a synchronisation rate that hadn’t dropped more than 10%.

‘Eat for me,’ Viktor prods meaningfully. ‘I don’t want to become fat like a certain piggy.’

Tears gather in the corner of Yuuri’s eyes as he clutches Yurio’s recycled shirt underneath the bench. He cries softly but his howls quickly increase in volume. Viktor’s eyes widen when he realises his mistake. His eyes are sky blue like unspoilt ocean.

When Yuuri has finally stopped crying, Viktor says, ‘If my love turned you into a skeleton I’d be afraid of loving you.’

His hands are unadorned.

* * *

 

The First Speaker agrees with the Fourth: ‘The pool of Bethesda could be the cause of the increasing gravitational density of the moon.’

‘Maybe investigate that further?’ the incumbent Second Speaker adds, the youngest of them. ‘If the last resting place of Adam’s physical body was located on the moon then the search for the destruction Sodom and Gomorrah could be stopped.’

 _That_ gets a response from the chamber. An unseeing plaster bust, male and with curly hair tied up in a ribbon rests on a drape of dark velvet between two shadows.

The Fourth’s voice is impassive. ‘Those who looked back on the destruction of the two cities in spite of the angel’s warnings were rendered pillars of salt as living testaments to those who aspired to godhood but fell short. Hence, the Failures of Infinity.’

‘All signs indicate the precipitation of the fourth major crises that our civilisation has faced.’ The First speaks slow and patiently.

‘It is in accordance with the plan,’ the Fifth Speaker says.

The Fifth is indicted by the Third, in a caustic tone. He admonishes, ‘Lilin’s ancestral precursor cannot be modelled based on Lilin’s own behaviour. Psychohistory cannot be used as a crutch for understanding. No talented psychologist has been born in the past decade to our depleted civilisation in the past decade. ’

The First agrees. ‘And yet, the Speaker of the Dead has never failed to grace us with an appearance. My third predecessor would attest to it.’

‘And what of Cain and Abel?’ The Third demands. ‘Where was the Speaker’s appearance then?’

He is greeted by the sound of breathing from the feed. Finally the Second’s soft voice begins. ‘The Speaker would not appear unless it was a crisis we could not overcome.

All can see the singular row of coffins – each orientated bottom to top vertically space as far as the eye can see. One has moved out of line with the others – an ugly subluxation, a dislocation which mars the perfect line, beauty imperilled by the proof of God’s existence.

The stone had been rolled away. The Speaker of the Dead walked among the living again.

* * *

 

The bow quavers across the strings as Yuuri plays the violin. He takes a breath, clears his head and a-one, a-two, a-three and he begins again, elbow crooked, eyes fixed with concentration as he plays Moonlight Sonata, making many tiny adjustments to the notes and the angle of the bow.

Viktor is watching him, one arm looped across the back of the chair, tilting his body silently towards Yuuri plays.

Yuuri’s shadow is diagonal and black, swaying as he riddles with the music, trying to draw it together. Another drawn breath and the note suceeds, but he skips the next quaver by accident. Struggling to regain his focus and rhythm the next note grinds into a minim and by then the bow has already bounced to a halt.

‘I promised to practice every day so I wouldn’t embarrass you. But I couldn’t even do that. Maybe my hands would fail me, or remember some other time I had messed up and let you down.’

A drawn breath. A clenched fist.

‘When you left, I didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps I was even glad that you were gone, that there was no one who could scare me into playing or tell me all the ways that I went wrong. That’s what scares me the most.’

Another pause, like the still body could hear.

‘Even when you went into a coma, I could never be as good as you. The way you played, there is only one musician born a lifetime that can play the violin as well as you do. So please -.’

A hand takes the bow and with infinite care applies the rosin the bow. The sweet rich smell of pine permeates the room, mingling with the smell of salt plucked from tear ducts. Yuuri’s face is ashen with self-disappointment.

‘Yurio would have been proud of you if he was still with us,’ Viktor tells him. They’re both wearing identity cards worn in a plastic sleeve. Viktor’s lies in a long lanyard, part green and part yellow. Briefly, their long shadows mingles in front of the plastic tubing and wiring that ties Yurio’s still form down.

Blood pressure in systolics and diastolics rises in green numbers from the machine and the steady green lines rise for his pulse. Numbers for his respiration and other vitals lie on the other side on another screen and still the daylight streams in harshly.

 ‘There is a piano at the Foundation. I used to play that, day out. Sometimes, Yukio would come to compliment me on my performance. Even Yakov desired to stay for the music. When the person I loved died, I stopped playing altogether. It was like the part of me that enjoyed playing had died too.’

‘Stop,’ Yuuri whispers.

‘When the loved one of the Speaker of the Dead died, he wore a golden ring on his fourth finger in memory.’ Viktor points to his right hand to illustrate his point.

Yuuri wrinkles his nose. ‘Who?’

But Viktor only laughs, lips forming into a heart shape. ‘Come on Yu-uri, I’ll show you the piano and I’ll let you play better than I can.’

_Goodnight Yurio._

* * *

 

The Speaker of the Dead, well I suppose he was one of the Foundations ghost stories. Foundation is a bit more democratic than Seele, not by much, or maybe they’re just less exclusive in their membership but in any case more fictional stories sprang up around him that Lazarus.

Plisetsky might have said that he’s a bit more like a bogeyman. Can walk across water (not the solid sort) can determine right from wrong, wrong from right, loves poodles (this part is an embellishment.)

* * *

 

He’s on the Tokyo streets and it’s drizzling, sitting on a cardboard box far from the temple that his family have made a home. Pedestrians walk and his field of vision ends at their knees. Striped neon signs glow in tight doorways leading up to shops rippling into the puddles. Cyclists pedal humming by, paying him little, if any attention.

Water drips down from his eyelashes which he wipes away onto his equally wet raincoat arm. He’s sniffling.

‘Poor child, to have been expelled from school so young.’ Nearby, gossip echoes from a hazel eyed woman.

‘Did you hear what happened to the teacher? Remarkable isn’t it.’

‘Seele had funded the program. Knew it was too good to be true. There was a large payout in money to the research participants you see, they had to sign an ethical release form and everything. The adverse effects must have been enormous. Only so much R&D budget that they can afford.’

‘My bet’s on human trafficking.’ The sound becomes coarse, then fades away and out of the range of hearing, replaced by a new sound.

Someone is humming Beethoven. It sounds strange to Yuuri’s ears, hear among the traffic. The tune ends when he begins to shake his umbrella, causing water droplets to collect and then roll off and then the fabric of it is drawn easily into a neat cone.

‘Found you,’ The stranger says lightly in flawless Japanese.

He was a foreigner with a lean slight build. A pair of piercing eyes gently dissect Yuuri as he leans furtively back on the brick wall, water falling down onto his nose from his neatly parted light grey hair. The rest of him is less remarkable, an army green coat of uniform colour, a black scarf wrapped around his neck and gloved hands.

Then he walks over to Yuuri, looks at him intently and kisses him on the lips, causing Yuuri’s eyes to flash open. Yuuri makes a small noise in his throat and the cardboard box to depress slightly. He’s the first to pull away, part resentful and part embarrassed.

‘I don’t know you.’ Yuuri says. ‘I’d like you to leave me alone.’

There’s surprise written large on the other man’s face. His eyes have gone round, the irises as blue as a robin’s egg. ‘Who am I?’ He muses softly. But now his abashed even though an annoyance permeates his face. ‘I’m sorry. You remind me of someone that I used to know so I don’t know what came over me. Farewell, Yuuri.’

* * *

 

He is a bumper car, not knowing where he’s going and in search of. The stars used to look right and somehow they are now wrong. A strange man just kissed him. He walks into a woman, holding a juniper branch, while listening to his casette. Thick, heavy set with arms and legs like an elephants limbs and American at a guess.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ she snaps, ‘The Angel warning siren sounded more than five minutes ago.’

It was true that the streets were already empty. Surely he had noticed the massive rush of people, even if he hadn’t heard the sirens. Surely –

‘I-I’

Evidently it’s not good enough of an excuse. She sighs in a melodramatic drawl, ‘Kid’s these days.’ Out go the earbuds from his walkman, shoved unceremoniously into his pockets.

He is grabbed, spun in the right direction and then gently pushed.

‘Well get going,’ She pronounces, unfairly annoyed. ‘The Angels aren’t going to wait patiently for the slow.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visiting family,’ She returns flatly, distantly. One half of her cheek is covered in pockmarks but only on the right. Her eyes are sunken and remind Yuuri of a squirrel from a television show that he used to watch. Her bag is worn, used and constant friction has rubbed off some of the paint that was applied to it.

* * *

 

The train was a bare metal affair, just a floor and large rectangle rounded windows set in walls through which unbroken sunset could penetrate. The dying sunlight danced feebly over the red LCL that drowned out the skyline. Like the snapped diaphysis of long bones stood houses torn by Ramiel, some half sinking into the red.

Viktor sits exhausted in the opposite seat. The tips of his thumbs kneaded his forehead as they had since he’d held a convulsing Yurio, the same hands that had held Yuuri when they kissed, the same hands that had waved to a crouching Yuuri as he had merrily climbed out of his white and blue Eva.

Yuuri stares at his own hands now to avoid looking at the carriage’s only other occupant. They shake. They vibrate more as the train picks up a speed that jolts Yuuri’s solitary black bag sitting on the luggage rack.

* * *

 

He sinks through the warm LCL. Foetal, he flounders, but with a practiced hand he finds himself. When the auditory and visual hallucinations have faded and the screens have cleared he pushes off with ease. In the comm, Viktor is uncommonly silent but when he notices Yuuri’s look he bursts into a smile.

‘I don’t know why Yakov won’t let us pilot together,’ Viktor broadcasts. He’s not wearing a proper plugsuit but instead his winter coat – the synthetic fur trim is visible through the screen although it lacks the undulation one would expect when submerged in LCL. ‘With my dexterity and your accuracy we would have made quite the team.’

‘The moon is unknown territory.’

‘So-‘ That’s all the man gets out.

‘Don’t patronise me Vitaya.’ Yuuri grinds out. He adjusts then readjusts his controls. They move smoothly, almost frictionlessly. ‘No one has flown through space in centuries except unmanned drones. The gravity is only one tenth of Earth norm. No training simulation can fully cover anything we might face, least of all angels. And I agree with Yakov, one Eva would just make us an easier target.’

‘Point taken.’  He rubs his eyes, there is a redness to them that makes Yuuri think that he might be getting ill.

‘I just want you to know that whatever happens I trust you.’ Viktor says through the feed before he closes the communication, ‘Completely and utterly.’

He’s gone in a dash. There is a kind of natural runway that has been set up below the left lower hemisphere of Foundation so Yuuri follows Viktor off the edge. At the nadir of the fall, he engages the propulsion system that has been built into the unit’s feet. It’s still snowing, flurries of it and Yuuri feels the coldness as if the suit’s sensors are his own.

Then he feeling the tug of zero G in the centre of his chest and they’ve cleared the top hemisphere of Foundation. Perhaps, beyond the red ocean that stretches in all directions he could catch a glimpse of Tokyo’s ruins.

* * *

 

The moon was a behemoth in the sky, marbled blue and white crossed by leylines both horizontal and vertical of crimson. Viktor, from his position in the EVA locates Antioch on its surface, a paler red blotch and its sister Bethesda’s deeper blood like features. He counts the stars in the Sirius cluster and isolates Polaris’ strong glow.

Yakov initiates contact. The man was devoted to timetables, every action was carefully considered before being conducted. Second Contact was video feed as well as audio with no masking of the line.  That act was over.

‘How’s my Speaker going?’ Yakov’s voice was gruff. He’d probably been fiddling with the VGA feed because it went from blurry to clear before fixing on clear. Through the video, he couldn’t tell if Yakov still resented him over Yurio’s fate.

He’d always been bad at that. The reading people part, he reflects ruefully.

‘Dancing on the head of the pin. You?’ Viktor nods.

‘Break a leg.’ Yakov says and then rather abruptly he ends the feed. Still bitter then, Viktor thinks. Reading him was like reading an incomprehensible volume. What had happened to the young man he’d used to know? Lost his academic ambition, lost his wife and finally lost his synchronisation rate.

Yakov had liked Yurio and finally Viktor’s actions had taken Yurio from him. Now, he spent his days outside the refinery huddled around a refilled cup of syrup gold Medovukha, glancing into the strange moon and the daytime stars with his glass shaped much like the facets of the Foundation. Thinking, perhaps naively, that Viktor didn’t know that a synchronisation rate of zero was required for Speakership.

* * *

 

Viktor stands with one foot on the prow, surveying the ocean, a posture that Yuuri would have never dared to maintain so close to the end of the boat. Here and there, float chunks of ice like broken teeth in a mouth of dark blood, the vast sea constricting around them like throat around a meal, peristaltic and intimidating.

‘There’s nothing there,’ Viktor announces throwing his binoculars to Yuuri. The boy catches it cemented deeper in the little skiff, bundled up in layers of winter clothes so tightly that he resembled a loaf of bread tied with strings bursting at the seams. He was also wearing a breathing apparatus to filter the toxins from the air and the lenses of the mask stripped the harmful radiation from the sun.

In contrast, Viktor was dressed lightly in just his jacket, a teal and gloves with no such protection. ‘How’s our proximity?’ He calls to Yuuko.

‘All clear for the next ten kilometres,’ She replies. ‘Isn’t nothing, a bit of an optimistic estimate?’

Viktor pushes more weight onto the foot in front, causing the prow to slump downwards and more of the boat to submerge. The stern rises in response, Yuuri yelping and scrabbling to secure a better spot.

‘Well I heard the last team came back with NAD.’

‘Their files and surveys came back with NAD. Forensics never found what happened to their bodies but they did find No Abnormalities Detected. Scrawled into every page they’d brought with them. In their diaries. In the log. Said they pushed hard enough to break the paper.’

‘Ahh.’ For a minute, the normally pale Russian’s face heats up a warmer red, but then he blows on his hands. He poises a gentle question. ‘Say, Yuuko and Yuuri do you think it would be bad idea if I went for a swim?’

Before Yuuko and Yuuri’s astonished stare, he kicks off the larger part of his clothes and dives into the red ocean and shakes his hair to dislodge some of the water. He’s grinning so widely that crows feet crinkle the sides of his eyes.

‘Exactly like your onsen,’ he says with some small satisfaction. The water’s warm, or so he claims.

‘I never had one.’

Viktor hums a few more notes of Ode to Joy. ‘Perhaps I remembered wrong,’ He says with an open face and guileless expression.

Later when Viktor has patted himself dry and has carefully plucked the golden ring from the top layer of his outer clothes and redressed, they find a clearing of snow. Wind blows fiercely across the snow and frost rings the top of Viktor’s parka.

Viktor kindles timber as ice streams across the face while Yuuri lies half in and out of their makeshift shelter tied lopsided between two trees. Or rather, Yuuri watches as Viktor tries unsuccessfully to start a fire three times and then takes the matches into his own hands and succeeds on his first attempt.

They toast marshmallows amongst more solid food across the makeshift brazier. The flames burn orange blue in the impure atmosphere and the robust shape of the Evas on the water cast bizarre shadows. When night has truly fallen, signet ring clusters burn like fireflies in the lights of the aurora borealis that has asserted itself in the sky.

* * *

 

They were specks in the void, tiny and inconsequential beings drifting by the grace of the toe boosters on the EVAs. This far away from Earth, many of the transmissions that normally buffeted and maintained the EVAs were absent.

They were on their own.

‘I’ve told you a lot about myself,’ Yuuri says tinny through the speakers, ‘But what about you?’

Viktor repositions his coat placidly careful not to lose his grip on Cassius. Yuuko had been working on synthetic analogues but they were all unusable prototypes.  ‘Well, I’m not that exciting. Standard household living mostly. I became a pilot fairly early in life, you know.’

‘It’s funny. Because Yakov said you were an orphan born on the date of the Second Impact and you’d never known your parents.’

Viktor remembers the movement of the cassette player in Yuuri’s hand inexorably unwinding. On and on it went, around and around each turn the exact same as the previous cycle, the delusion of progress. ‘Well it is what it is. You should ask Yakov if you want the unembellished version. I’ll send you pictures if you don’t believe me.’ He promises. ‘The genuine article.’

He imagines accelerating and the command is propelled to the central nerve clusters of the EVA, effortlessly increasing the tempo.

Viktor Nikiforov was many things. And currently he was a blind fumbling child.

* * *

 

The hemisphere of white daylight is quartered by two people seated back to back. One set of legs are crossed. The others aren’t but the hands are clasped together, respectful. The shadows are stripes stretching all the way across the floor.

‘How are the kids? They’d be what, nine months old now?’

‘You’d think they’d get better but my youngest just won’t stop crying. Constantly. And when it’s time for bed, they always insist on sleeping with mummy because of the nightmares. My oldest wants to be a pilot like you.’

‘Well I always wanted to be a pirate.’ He looks down at his clasped hands. ‘So if you want to tell him my real career ambitions, go ahead!’

She laughs at the image. ‘I’ll tell him you said that.’ But she sobers. ‘You were  always so optimistic, Viktor.’

‘I have Yuuri to keep me in line. Did you know that just the other day he told me that I’m balding?’ The corners of his lips turn down in mock disappointment. He does such an animated impression of Yuuri where she can’t see him that her eyes twitch and she reaches her wrist up to her eyes to dab at it thinking that he can’t see.

And finally when they’ve fallen into silence. ‘There are no angels on the moon, Viktor.’

She’s wearing a pasty summer dress with mint coloured flowers.

* * *

 

They dock with the space station first. The metal has worn down, thinned by constant showers of small debris and dust pushing through it over time. Viktor climbs out of his EVA first, crawling out of the tube and then curling up into a ball and gracefully, unfolding touching down on the balls of his feet.

‘I’m coming out too,’ the boy says from the maw of the beast.

A gaze is levelled. ‘No you’re not.’ A bubble shaped helmet – a source of oxygen that he doesn’t need – is being positioned underneath the crook of his arm. ‘Stay in the EVA. I’ll be back soon. See you in a few minutes Yu-uri.’ He waves, gliding backwards on a propulsion system which issues smooth trails of flames behind him as he travels.

A circular torch beam shining along a section of metal door. It’s jammed even when Viktor unsuccessfully puts the force of his shoulder into it.

Then the door crumples under the fist of the EVA like paper.

Viktor scratches the top of the smooth surface of the nano-laminate helmet smiling foolishly. ‘Well maybe I should’ve thought of that first.’

‘Viktor? Don’t be a stranger, okay?’

No one could mistake the momentary shock across his face.

‘I won’t Yuuri.’ The promise comes easily to his lips.

Inside the space station are centuries old skeletons in the remains of space suits. With the force of the Eva’s blow, they drift on out in a silent procession. He shuts the derelict computer station after finding no life signs on the moon and once more he picks his way out through the debris again.

* * *

 

Viktor had sealed the practice room but music had still tinkled out, turning movement into gold. His hands could shape the music into a quick jovial rhythm or a joyless staccato march. Pressure applied from the pads of his fingers could swell a pianissimo into a fortissimo and down again.

‘I thought you said you didn’t play anymore.’

‘You’ll find I say a lot of things that I don’t necessarily mean.’ He says, airily. ‘Because then I found you, my muse, and suddenly none of it mattered anymore.’

He doesn’t look at the sheet music, he didn’t need to but neither does he look at Yuuri as the door swung closed behind him.

Effortlessly, he segues from Beethoven’s marching rhythm – Yuuri into something lighter and sweeter.

‘Remember this?’

‘I’ve never heard it before.’ Yuuri confesses.

Briefly, Viktor’s face conveys disappointment but higher and higher do the notes of the song soar and when they collapse it is with grace. _It’s a song of your life._ ‘It’s the story of love lost and love found.’

Yuuri gets to the numb of the matter. ‘I see. Where’s Makkachin?’

‘Out with Yuuko. Why?’

Yuuri can barely hear past the blood rushing through his ears. ‘I’ve seen the way you lock the door to prevent Makkachin from getting in. I can see the scratch marks where every night Makkachin tries to get in and you haven’t even bothered seeing your poodle in weeks. How can you be so cold?’

‘You deserve more than me, Yuuri.’

‘Not every conversation is about you and me, Viktor. Ten years is a long time for a dog. How much longer do you think you have left with Makkachin? Why do you feel the need to push Makkachin away?’

The music is ebbing out of Viktor’s fingers. ‘Yuuri,’ he calls out but is rewarded with no response except the slamming of the door.

The music dies, altogether.

And when they eat together in the cold white room, Viktor keeps his head down, silent, eyes bloodshot, made raw and ugly by grief.

* * *

 

Night falls. The cassette player sits on Yuuri’s bedside underneath the illumination of the alarm clock. His chest moves rhythmically.

A bare foot slides onto the ground and a second joins them silently. Together, the limbs move towards the door, torso swathed in a bathrobe. The stabilising hand, which briefly catches around the frame to prevent the floor from creaking is the last to vanish.

The warm orange light illuminated the varnished wood surface. It illustrated the grains, the minor imperfections and the whorls of the wood. Here, Yakov had placed his hot beverage directly on the wood, creating circular marks. There, Viktor with his heat proof cups had left the wood unblemished.

Yakov stares at the coffee table with a barely imperceptible frown, seeing only Cassius in its inert form - as short as a dining fork with its two short tines and the slick oily red surface.

* * *

 

**Then:**

Viktor slaps the heavy skates into Yuuri’s hands. ‘Today, we’ll be trying something different,’ he says, leaning on the rink wall, breath leaving milk white puffs in the cold air. ‘Try and catch me.’

And he kicks into motion, gliding before, executing a flawless Triple Lutz.

**Now:**

You run. You can’t run very well on the moon, the surface is too slippery without weight to hold his shoes down and to make them grip, which was why Viktor’s propulsion gear had been more effective. It’s a passing regret that its now too late to go back for it.

Forward-thinking. Innovative. Those were parts of Viktor that Yuuri could never be.

‘Viktor!’ Yuuri Katsuki screams. Tears bubble up around his eyes.

You’d thrown the spear. Thing was, in your heart you’d already reacted when you saw the AT field and in horror when Viktor cries for help. Thing was, the AT field gives off photons – the light would need to reflect off your retina after all. And Viktor was standing on the other side of the Pool of Bethesda, tightened down into a lens like macrocosm of sorts.

He says, ‘I’m sorry.’ Like he really sincerely is. And across the space between you, the spear swims, punches through the red pool like a knife through water and punches straight through his sternum and out the other end. And he suspends there for a while at the zenith of the arc.

It’s funny, how much he can bleed. Great gobs of red, floating out of his mouth and nose, blending into each other, forming a loop of sorts and he falls backwards, away from the false luminescence of the moon towards the Earth.

* * *

 

‘I loved to skate.’ He says when all that lies between him and arctic weed and snow is the wrinkled black sleeping bag, with his hands around his head and his mouth attains the thoughtful lopsidedness that Yuuri loves.

The boy imagines it. And then he raises his arm to the roof of the shelter as if he can reach the sky that way.

 _Let me skate with you again, Yuuri_.

* * *

 

Under the timeless passage of a landscape of red stretching as far as the eye can see bone white mountain peaks rise from the cradle of humanity. A river, suspended, does not flow and the world’s constant companion, a black starless sky is the umbrella that shades the world.

A man is walking. And the red on his shirt is the same hue and tone that gives the colour to the landscape, but that too was frozen like a bloom.

‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ The Speaker of the Dead says, ‘A person in a coma would have a synchronisation rate of zero.’

The Second Speaker, a black hood pulled tight over his fair hair tosses his hair, hands buried in the single pocket in his hoodie snorts. ‘Huh. But that isn’t really true if I’m here right? Clearly, someone like Viktor Nikiforov can’t bear to be wrong.’ And, underneath his breath in a whisper, for Yuuri: ‘Asshole.’

* * *

 

‘I was fond of him for what it was worth.’ Yakov’s voice was gruff as the gurney carried Viktor away. He moves the weight from the balls of one foot to the other. Tense. Tired. Uncomfortable. ‘I knew that no matter what I did it wouldn’t bring Yurio back. No one wants to die. So I told him –‘

‘So you told him - if the moon falls the sky will cave in and Yuuri will die because of your existence.’

‘It was a risk I had to take.’ Yakov answers.

* * *

 

The pews of standing people, reacting to the falling moon allow the apparition through. He pushes an IV stand, the drip still connected at his wrist with transparent tape, past the shelf of prescription paper and packets of IV cannulas.  A yellow folder of patient documents briefly catches his eye but he lets it pass.

At the reception area a boy sleeps on his right shoulder, a book spilling from his left bare hand. He kisses Yuri’s hair, briefly.

Then a splotch of red hits the floor and he’s on the floor, gasping. A doctor, a tall brown haired man with indigo gloves and a clipboard briefly turns to him with askance on his lips, away from the nurse. A baby cries from a mother’s shoulder. Yuuri’s eyes flicker open.

And the episode passes, he’s standing again. It reverts – Yuuri’s eyes close like the petals of a flower shrinking back into the bud, the doctor turns away back the way he came to resume his argument with the three nurses and the baby falls back into sound, satisfied sleep.

He gets to his feet in the dance of the heavily wounded, hand still pressed tight over his chest, grimacing slightly feeling as unsteady as a newborn foaling. Briefly, he leans against the wall for support, spent. Makkachin’s tail dips.

‘I couldn’t be with you forever Makkachin,’ he tells the poodle when he has regained his breath. Makkachin cries and whines in heartbreak, but they leave the hospital together.

An elevator passes over the blue-purple skyline while one occupant sits on the floor and the other licks his hair.

* * *

 

‘It’s a cold night outside,’ the dark haired boy says as a poodle scampers up to him, from the direction of the baggage hold. He sighs, reaching out to scratch Makkachin’s head. ‘I’m not your owner though, I couldn’t possibly replace them.’ Black earbuds wind from his ears to his pocket.

Makkachin tilts his head to one side to one side eyes keen like black studs and barks keenly and is rewarded with some sandwich chicken, still coated in mayonnaise following a rustle from the brown paper bag that the boy was carrying.

And the dog returns, carefully holding the chicken in between its jaws, retreats back to the hold where Viktor was staring at the ceiling, still wearing the flimsy hospital gown, tied up at the back.

* * *

 

He makes it two kilometres without folding in a black sedan which isn’t his, with only Makkachin by his side. A good effort, all things considered, for a dying person.

When he wakes up, someone has moved him into the passenger seat and the soaked bandages have been replaced.

‘Where are we going?’ Yuuri asks without preamble, without accusation.

‘Home.’ The answer, brief but filled with terrible longing.

* * *

 

They drive to the beach on the last tank of fuel. The water froths like blood boiling, ichor black in the night and Viktor’s hands ache from where he has clenched his hands, pressing his nails into his palm, creating semilunar marks. He is afraid of sleep.

‘I’m glad to have met you, Yu-uri.’ He waves his cannulated right hand, grinning, masking his hurt and pain from the world.

The thunderous air, carries the smell of gasoline and burning rather than sea salt. Someone has been blowing bubbles and their films run with all the colours of the rainbow.

Yuuri carries Viktor to the ocean that he wanted to see the most.

‘The stars are beautiful, aren’t they Viktor?’ He says to his lover.

But there was nothing in Viktor’s sightless eyes except for the moon and that too disappeared when Yuuri lays him down gently on the sand and closes his eyes with his fingertips.

* * *

 

In the distance the EVAs were eating each other.

* * *

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The Beijing stopover had taken longer than initially anticipated and Viktor had felt his face getting longer and longer throughout the entire trip. But all the worries were gone now, washed away. He felt fresh, reinvigorated and inspired by the prospect of meeting Yuuri again.

Yakov had already rung twice.

‘Viktor, what on earth are you thinking?’

‘Tourism, sightseeing and oh maybe some muse finding.’ Viktor twirls his wrist and ends the call just as Yakov is about to launch into a rant.

As they walk by, the scowling face of Yurio, angled on a dramatic diagonal glares down from the large high definition monitors. His hand is thrust up in the promotional still.

‘Makkachin,’ Viktor laughs in peals of delight, ‘Can you believe that he’s being called the Ice Fairy now? The sky must be falling in.’

The poodle simply tilts a head to one side.

‘Now here’s someone I want to see more of,’ He says when a nervous eyed boy, appears hands outstretched wide. He strikes a mock pose, taking a leaf from J. J.’s book for an invisible camera, ‘In Japan, I’ll be Viktor – talent scouting!’  
  
It coincides with an image of him, flashing across the screens and that attracts the attention of locals.

Through the sheer chaos, Makkachin manages to quietly slip away. Then, with infinite reverence and respect, Makkachin spits out a smooth gold ring, generously coated in saliva into the gutter. Solemnly, the dog looks at it, before bounding back to rejoin Viktor. 


End file.
